November 20, 2007

For those who definitely don’t like the acclaimed TextMate when developing Ruby on Rails applications, chances were not very wide so far. We had RadRails, a RoR focused IDE, who showed off months ago as a promising working frame in its earliest versions, but has been lately reported that its developers have start loosing interest in improving it. We had also Eclipse, whose Ruby support has been also criticized.The finally we have since September the Ruby edition of the well-known NetBeans IDE. We have just installed it, so expect in the next day a comprehensive review. So far, it looks very promising. Let’s take a look at some of its advantages:

Only 19Mb to download, a fair memory consumption and a lot of helpful functionality out of the box.

It ships with code completion that works, extremely useful for those who never manage to learn by heart the rails framework. But also includes inline documentation just pressing CTRL + SPACE when typing a keyword.

Rake support and generations of models, scaffolds, controllers… just in one click!